Nancy Reagan's Enduring Love
Nancy Reagan's Enduring Love were a band that played song from Valley Stream, New York. They started out in early 2005 as a two piece between superchums Craig (guitar/voice) and Ian (drums). They formed shortly after Ian picked up the instrument. The group spent the next year practicing in Ian's basement on a near-daily basis, struggling to figure out how to play together through covers of Strokes and Interpol songs that were very, very bad. Soon they were good (relative) enough to embark on writing songs of their own. The first pair of these songs are documented on the self-released We'll Be Bigger Than The Sun CD-R single from spring 2006. All of their friends (there weren't many) liked these songs very much and the two burgeoning young men were very proud of themselves. They continued to write and record more songs that summer, when they had a chance myspacedotcom meeting with like-minded locals The Electric Sentiments. The Sentiments and their sister band Ether Switch invited NREL to contribute a songs to a compilation they were putting together. The group entered ETHERSWITCHEADQUARTERS in August to record three tracks -- including a rerecorded "Bigger than the Sun" -- for the comp, but the project was eventually scrapped and the songs were never released. That fall, the band booked its first gig at local shithole the Village Pub South. For their live show, the band enlisted the help of lead Sentiment and new superchum Joshua on bass. The show went over pretty well for whatever reason and the performance was unfortunately recorded. These live recordings found their way onto newer CD-R versions of Sun, yet the band would later come to disavow these bootlegs. Nan continued to play shows, mostly at the VP South, a venue which ripped them off time and time again. They were very young and stupid, you see. The boys also played their school talent show, a gig in which the band received huge applause, signed autographs, and were literally proclaimed heroes. But perhaps their most notorious show was a Hurricane Katrina battle of the bands benefit at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock. Slotted to play last, the event's sinister and androgynous organizers sought to sabotage NREL's set by cutting their time short significantly and doing a horrible job at mixing the sound. In response, the group destroyed the equipment they had provided, made a tasteless joke about Katrina, and stormed off-stage. The evil organizers were initially furious, yet the band somehow later convinced them to apologize. It is assumed that the band did not win. Several more dead-end shows at the VP South, coupled with creative frustrations drove Ian to quit the band in spring 2007. Craig took it very hard; it was quite an ugly breakup. At the time prepping their debut LP, he and Joshua were at an impasse until the summer, when Sentiment/Switcheroo Douglas agreed to fill in on drums. Joshua sort of wandered off somewhere at this point, as Craig and Douglas spent many a sweaty August afternoon once again hauled up in ETHERSWITCHEADQUARTERS recording the basic tracks to the record. They finished all the drum tracks, but were dissatisfied with how they sounded. The project gradually disintegrated. NREL's last show was at a very corrupt and sinful youth center called The Wave in Patchogue. They were offered the gig by a local cock rock band called Fastizio, yet Fastizio made them contact the venue themselves, and the venue's evil Christian pedophile owners coerced them into selling the tickets themselves. NREL showed up to the gig, appropriately in beach attire, and played an entertaining, if shambolic set to virtually no one. Fastizio conveniently showed up after Nan had finished playing, as did their fans. The group passive-aggressively called out these Futstizios over the internet, exchanging heated emails. The beef was never resolved, and it is rumored that both groups recorded diss tracks. NREL then planned to record a split single with their best budz the Electric Sentiments over the course of a weekend later that year, now referred to by revisionists as "Ory's Lost Weekend." Tracks were recorded and briefly circulated the web, but the project was, like all the rest, eventually scrapped. It was clear then to Craig, at that point the only real member of the band, that Nancy Reagan's Enduring Love's sunshine days were over. The band had run its course, and eventually disbanded. Rumors arose in spring 2008 that the entire group had died, but a more plausible explanation is that each member is working on new projects under pseudonyms. In a perfect world, one would like to imagine that where NREL failed, the love -- despite all the fallouts -- endured it all, and that maybe, just maybe, these young gentlemen are once again working together. Hopefully it's a bit more interesting this time. myspace.com/nrel